GroundTruth: PAN's blog on pesticides, food & health

Today we are one step closer to protecting kids in this country — and around the globe — from persistent chemicals.

A group of senators proposed a new law this week to revamp our 35-year-old system of managing toxic chemicals. Our friends in Washington tell us this version of the bill is stronger than the attempt that stalled in Congress last year. How very refreshing to have good news coming out of DC!

Tomorrow morning, as you pour milk into your kids’ cereal bowls or buy a latte to get you going, take a moment to think about the dairy and other family farmers who will be braving gusty winds off Lake Michigan to converge on the steps of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. These farmers are demanding an end to the price fixing and speculation by traders that has bankrupted thousands of family farmers across the U.S., while spurring food crises worldwide.

More than 35 California legislators, including Speaker of the Assembly John Pérez, submitted a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency urging policymakers to “suspend and cancel all uses of iodomethane (methyl iodide) in the United States…” on April 4, 2011.

In an apparent, and failed, attempt at self-defense, honey bees are sealing off pesticide-laced pollen.

U.S. entomologists published a study two years ago that described a newly observed phenomenon in honey bees, now known as entombed pollen: food stores sealed off by bees after being deposited in the hive. That pollen was much higher in pesticide residues than any other pollen stored in the hive, and correspondingly had no detectable bacteria or fungi. Hives with entombed pollen were more than twice as likely to collapse later in the season than hives without it.

Ready to geek out? We’ve updated our pesticide residue database, What’s On My Food?, with the latest chemical and toxicology data – including a new dimension that tracks bee-toxic pesticides. And we made a widget!

What's a widget? Fair question. It’s a snippet of computer code that allows you (or your favorite blogger) to host the What’s On My Food? search function on your website or blog. You can download it here.

This week, the Administration and Congress are poised to make huge cuts to vital conservation programs that may spell the end of the Farm Bill as we know it. We must oppose this short-sighted lunacy, and the time is now.

Please join the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) and PAN as we urge the leader of the Senate Agriculture committee, Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), to do everything possible to protect Farm Bill conservation funding. You can email Senator Stabenow even if you're not in Michigan — I did, it's easy. She needs to know that people across the country care about conservation.

For the past 3 months, communities across Asia have been campaigning for Safe Rice for Life and Livelihood! — the rallying cry of this year's Collective Rice Action, organized by PAN Asia-Pacific's ongoing Save Our Rice Campaign.

This year's grassroots effort focused on raising awareness about the costs of chemically intensive rice farming across the region. Thousands of people concerned about protecting the health of farmers and their land flocked to a range of campaign events in 15 countries.

I couldn't bring 9-month-old Connor with me when I attended my first POPs treaty meeting in Bonn, so I brought my breastmilk pump instead. I vividly remember struggling with my rusty German to convince the women in the conference center kitchen to store my milk in the deep freeze.

As a nursing mother, participating in the POPs treaty meetings took on a very personal dimension. Here's why: persistent chemicals build up in food chains across the globe, and this is a key reason the treaty exists. Human milk — nature's perfect food for infants — is at the very top of the food chain. This is why POPs show up so often in breastmilk.

This week, in a fitting tribute to Cesar Chávez, the union that the farmworker leader co-founded in 1962 joined with a Palo Alto-based food service company to release a groundbreaking report describing the current status of the nation’s 1.4 million farmworkers, and calling for fundamental changes to improve farmworker welfare.